


Musical Chairs

by flugantamuso



Category: The Pretender
Genre: AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-10
Updated: 2010-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 03:20:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/49106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flugantamuso/pseuds/flugantamuso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And where it ends, nobody knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Musical Chairs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inmyriadbits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inmyriadbits/gifts).



They had to move again.

Lyle was crying about it; he'd made a new friend. Parker had no friends. She didn't need any, she had Jarod.

It was only herself and Jarod and Lyle and Mother now. Last year there'd been Angelo too, but he had to go to a different school, and the day that they had to move he hadn't come home.

Mother had cried all day.

Now Lyle was crying, and Parker was tired of it. "Come on," she said impatiently jerking his hand (they always held hands on the way home) "you want to get left behind?"

"Stop it," said Jarod from Lyle's other side, "It's ok that he's sad to leave his friends."

"He doesn't need them," said Parker, "he's got us."

Jarod looked at her over Lyle's blond head, dark eyes serious. "How would you feel if you had to leave me behind?" he asked.

Lyle yelped when her hand reflexively jerked around his. "I wouldn't leave you behind," she said fiercely, "not ever."

***

Parker wasn't allowed to visit the little boy with dark hair who lived in the basement. The last time her daddy caught her down there he'd yelled so loud the veins bulged from his forehead.

He'd looked almost frightened.

But she couldn't help herself; she was so curious, and after all, he was only a boy.

He said that his name was Jarod, and he let her play with his toys. After a while one of the guards came, but Jarod told him to go away, and he did.

She started to feel hungry, and knew that she should go up to supper, but she couldn't leave the little black-haired boy alone.

Then Parker's father came and stood on the other side of the room. Parker thought about going over to him, but then she didn't think about it anymore.

"You have to let her go now," Father said to Jarod.

"I don't want to," said Jarod. He turned to her. "Do you want to go?"

She had before, but now....

"No," she said, "I want to stay here with you forever." And so she did.

***

There was a new kid in class, a stuck-up know-it-all who'd corrected her in front of the whole class. Parker glared at the back of his head from her seat at the back of the class.

Jarod. Jarod the loser, Jarod the geek. She glared harder, determined to make his life miserable. It shouldn't be too hard. Who would like someone like that?

Except everyone did. Angelo stuck to Jarod's side like glue, and the two of them were always whispering to each other. Even Lyle and his little gang became quiet when Jarod started talking.

It was frustrating. During recess she sat on a swing and kicked sand, plotting.

She was good at plotting, good at practical jokes, really good at gym. She wasn't really good at making friends, but she had Lyle, and until recently she'd had Angelo too. Now they both seemed more interested in Jarod.

When Lyle came over to talk to her she kicked him in the shin and went inside.

She started her revenge the next day.

First she put glue in his desk.

He just smiled at her.

Then she switched the juice bottle in his locker with one that had been sitting in the sun outside the playground fence for three days.

He looked a little green at the first swallow, but then he just laughed and drank the rest of it.

She saw red.

During gym class she "accidentally" knocked him off the pommel horse, then during art she lost her balance and dumped a capful of red paint in his hair. He stood up and threw yellow paint at her. She hit him over the head with her easel.

She got detention, even though the paint thing had obviously been a mistake, and the easel was just retaliation for the entirely unfair flinging of paint on his part.

At least he got detention too, though that just meant that she had to put up with his attempts at an apology.

"Look," he was saying, "I'm sorry about your shirt."

"I don't care about the shirt," she snapped, scrubbing vigorously at the microwave.

An odd look came over his face. "You know," he said tentatively, "when a boy pays a lot of negative attention to a girl they say that it's because he likes her. Do you think that what's happening between us it the same thing, only the other way around?"

She got another detention for kicking him in the groin, but it was totally worth it.

***

She stayed in the basement with Jarod now. So did Lyle and Angelo and Sydney and a lot of other children and people. Daddy slept downstairs, but went upstairs with the men during the day. Sometimes they came back without a man or two. Sometimes they came back red and sticky.

It was because of the monsters. She'd never seen one, but Sydney said that they ate people. It gave her nightmares a few times, but she wouldn't tell her daddy what she was scared of. She didn't want to get Sydney in trouble.

Sydney and Jarod were always working, with microsopes and little glass slides and vials of red blood that Daddy would bring back everyday. Jarod said that they were working on a way to beat the monsters, but Parker thought that if they didn't hurry up there wouldn't be anyone left to do the beating.

One day Daddy came back and instead of taking Sydney the little vials of blood he took Parker to the quiet end of the basement and showed her how to use his gun. It was big and heavy in her hands and it hurt them when it went off, hurt her ears too. But she did it, and then she turned to give it back to him, but he wouldn't take it, told her to keep it.

He didn't come back the next day.

***

Jarod was the bane of her existence. Ever since Mother had died he'd been getting angrier and more annoying.

Parker went to talk to Lyle about it. Lyle lived in the basement and was really really smart, but he didn't have any answers about Jarod.

Jarod really was annoying, but he was also her brother, so she tried to include him in things. She showed him the pipes, and they went exploring together. She showed him the rabbits that she'd discovered on the second floor and rows of babies in closed plastic cribs on the fourth floor.

They stood looking at the little screwed up faces together, for once not arguing, until the nurse discovered them and threw them out.

Jarod showed her things too, things she never would have thought of on her own. How to rig a bucket of water so that it falls down on the next person to go through the door, how to make creepy noises in the shadows to make the guards nervous.

It was fun, but then one day their exploring led them to a room full of filled with knobs and dials and blinking lights. She looked at it with awe. "You could control everything from here."

He looked at her with michief in his eyes. "And you could turn everything off.

She bit her lip. It was tempting, but--"We would get in so much trouble."

"Not if they don't know that it's us," he pointed out. "How fast can you crawl through those pipes?"

Pretty fast, as it turned out, and a good thing too.

***

Every summer, when she got off of school she went to visit Jarod, and every summer he showed her something new and exciting. Two years ago he'd shown her the eggs he'd been incubating and she got to see a chick hatch. Last year he'd shown her the little robot he'd built who could talk with anyone's voice you wanted to give it. This year he brought out a black box with blue stripes and lots of little wires.

She looked at it skeptically. It didn't look very exciting, but then the robot hadn't been very exciting until it spoke.

He looked excited. "Here, touch this button while I attach these wires."

She touched the button. Nothing happened. "Jarod," she began, "I don't think that this is--"

And then things just.........melted away.

It was kind of like an elevator, the feeling of your stomach dropping to your knees, but this was an elevator that went on and on, and so fast that everything was blurry and she couldn't breathe. The only thing that she could see was Jarod's face in front of her, his mouth open in an expression of surprise.

There was a lurch and she was coughing, breathing again, eyes tearing up so much she couldn't see.

Someone was pounding on her back, and Jarod's voice was saying something.

Finally her breathing leveled out and she rolled onto her back, blinking.

Jarod was standing over her, looking around with wide eyes. Annoyed that he wasn't paying attention to her when she was almost dying she pounded on his foot, but he didn't seem to notice that, so she looked over to see when he was watching.

It was a really big lizard with a long neck that was chomping peacefully on green grass.

She blinked. "Jarod, where are we?"

***

Parker was used to having the run of the centre, except the sixth floor and a few of the labs in the basement. She was not used to seeing other children around, at least not where they weren't supposed to be.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed to Jarod as they bumped into each other on the fourth floor next to the horticulture lab.

"What am I doing here?" he said belligerently, "what are you doing here? You're not supposed to leave the basement!"

She choked back on her reply, looking at him. He didn't look any different, but the Jarod who she occasionally visited was never belligerent, never impatient, never anything but patient and kind. This Jarod looked arrogant and annoying.

She crossed her arms over her chest. "Better get back to your little hide-a-way," she said, "because I'm going to go tell Sydney that you've been wandering the halls."

"Why would I care what you tell Sydney?" he said, "And if you don't go back to where you're supposed to be right now I'm going to tell my father about this."

"What father?" she asked, "you're a pathetic orphan, remember?"

He looked taken aback, and abruptly he said: "Who are you? You're not Parker, you can't be."

"And you're not Jarod," she said, "at least not the Jarod that I know."

They looked at each other suspiciously for several long seconds before he sighed and said, "Fine. Let's call a truce until we find out what's going on. Deal?"

They shook hands on it, and then she suggested that they go down to the basement, where each believed the other ought to be. "After all," she said, "If there's another Jarod down there then I'll know that you're not real, and if there isn't then I'll know that you've been playing a terrible trick on me and I'll bash you over the head."

"And if we find another Parker down there?"

"Then you'll know that I'm not real, or you can bash me over the head, whichever you like."

That decided, they went to the basement.

***

She went to visit him on Christmas holiday, almost skipping with the giddy joy of it. She had no friends at school, and there were no other children at the center save Angelo, who looked through her and never spoke.

He was busy with something, like always, and she went in smiling. He looked up at her and said, "Who are you?"

She stopped smiling. "I'm Parker," she said, "don't you remember?"

He looked puzzled. "No," he said, "I don't, and I have an excellent memory. Are you sure you don't have me confused with someone else?"

"Of course not," she said angrily, "You're Jarod, aren't you?"

"Yes," he said slowly, "but I don't remember you. Why don't you introduce yourself and we'll go from there?"

So she did and they had an excellent time, his terrible memory notwithstanding. It was almost fun, making friends all over again.

She came to visit him again over spring break.

"Jarod, you won't believe what happened to me on the way home!"

"Who are you?"

"You don't remember me?" But no, he wouldn't. It was worrying. Could it be brain damage? A mental handicap? That was hard to believe. She'd always thought that Jarod was the smartest person she knew.

But he didn't remember her then, and he didn't remember her again that summer.

Finally she went to talk to Sydney.

Sydney was talking to Daddy. Parker stayed in the shadow by the door to eavesdrop.

He was talking about genetic predisposition, and repeated failure. It sounded boring, but it was obviously important to him. His hands were trembling slightly where they rested on his legs. Daddy couldn't see them from the other side of the desk, but Parker could.

Daddy finally interrupted Sydney, telling him to scrap the current project and move on to the next one. "There are plenty of embryoes left, after all," he added, "we can afford to keep trying until we get this right."

Parker didn't understand this, but decided to talk to Sydney about Jarod some other day, when he didn't look so sad.

***

They'd both lived at the centre once, but that was before the government came and took them away from Daddy, from Sydney, from everyone. Now they lived with a lot of other boys and girls in a big house with a lot of bunkbeds and long tables. She didn't like it here, didn't like the other girls who ignored her, the other boys who picked on her. She sat with Jarod when they ate and scowled at the teachers and counselors who tried to be nice to her.

Someday she would run away and find her Daddy, and she was going to take Jarod with her.


End file.
